Mike Rogers pledges to revive CISPA

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers pledged Sunday to revive his cybersecurity legislation "as early as this week" and suggested Congress punt thornier reform questions until later this year.

Referring to his bill, known by its acronym CISPA, Rogers said lawmakers ought to "go for what we can pass in a bipartisan way," even as the White House prepares an executive order that would go a step further and try to develop new security standards for the nation's most critical infrastructure.

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While Rogers criticized the administration approach as "too slow, too cumbersome," he said on CBS's “Face the Nation” that lawmakers still could "go and try to tackle these regulatory standard issues later in the year."

Rogers's remarks come amid a torrent of new cyberattacks targeting The New York Times, Twitter and, most recently, the Bush family. That latter incident drew even a sharp monologue from host Bob Schieffer, who said it had been a "less than gentle reminder of how technology is redefining our culture, the whole idea of privacy and the respect, or lack of it, that citizens should have for each other."

To be sure, the cybersecurity reforms under consideration on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue are targeted mostly at power plants, water systems and other forms of critical infrastructure — the disruption of which could cause mass casualties and significant economic turmoil.

However, Washington has long been at loggerheads over how to do it — a rift that manifested itself in Sunday's roundtable. Rogers backed legislation that eschewed mandates, while Jane Harman, a former Democratic California congresswoman now running the Woodrow Wilson Center, backed a Senate bill from last year that has the same contours of the expected executive order from the Obama administration.

Jim Lewis, director of the Technology and Public Policy Program at CSIS, pointed to new threats coming from China, Iran and elsewhere. "We have a faith-based defense," he said of the country's current digital defenses. "It's good to think" of other countries like China "as near peers, if not peers in this space."

This article first appeared on POLITICO Pro at 12:04 p.m. on February 10, 2013.